School Choice and Administrators: Will Principals Become Marketers?

Clearing House, The, November, 2000 by ROBENSTINE, CLARK

At the level of political rhetoric, parental choice of school is championed as a mechanism that will make schools more responsive to their consumers, and thus much better. The rhetoric of school choice is rather straightforward: If we have faith in the free market and competition, we also know that things will turn out all right in the end, even if there is a degree of creative destruction along the way. In good Darwinian form, with formula funding--whereby school budgets are determined by student numbers--the good will survive, the weak will vanish, and everyone will be better off than before. For individual schools, this thinking reflects the self-interest of the school, its administrators and its teachers, in making policy decisions that are based on ensuring that...

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